


let her go, it'll be alright

by blackcanarys



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 12:18:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17580716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackcanarys/pseuds/blackcanarys
Summary: Nate and Amaya, in the realization that they're going to have to part ways. Sometimes love means letting go and it hurts. It always does.Or: the missing scene between the realization that the older Amaya chose to wipe her memory and Nate kissing Amaya goodbye.





	let her go, it'll be alright

They arrive back on the waverider, and they don’t talk. Wally had said something, but really, there wasn’t much left to say, nothing out loud that could alleviate _this_. Wally stops trying after the second try.

Nate remembers how the older Amaya doesn’t remember who he or the legends were, how she had looked at that photo of them in shock. She doesn’t remember, and it kills him in a way he didn’t know possible. Hopeless, despairing grief, he wants to call it, but Amaya’s still here, and that has to matter.

She’ll leave soon, yeah, but until then—

“Nathaniel.” Amaya calls to him, sitting side by side in the jump ship. Her voice is soft, and today, vulnerable. She’s hurting too, and Nate sees it, in her composition, holding it together through the miracle of willpower. “I didn’t know.”

She’s telling the truth, and in her own terms, they both know this is goodbye. This is where the train stops, where their journey ends, and they’re both desperately trying to hold on in their own way. Amaya by talking, trying her damnedest to maintain their relationship, and Nate’s of the school of thought that if it wasn’t addressed, they could pretend everything was alright.

The silence between them grows. Pernicious, cold and cruel—louder and more pronounced than anything they could’ve said, more prominent than anything he could’ve dreamed. It hurts, in a way Nate had never remembered feeling. The continual string of rejection from his dad, the things he has yet to address from his childhood, damn hemophilia, and yet, this somehow felt worse.

Maybe this was the curse of time travel: falling in love with something that’s destined to fall away from your fingertips, and still believing you could save it. Dancing among history, journeys and discoveries unsaid, unbelievably personal and life transforming, and in the end, still meaning nothing.

All Nate can manage is an apology. He looks at her, and she’s beautiful, always has been and always will be—if this is heaven, then he’s experienced it. If this is hell, then this is it.

He loves her more than life itself, in the way he only admired others from afar. Only now, in the imminent face of passing, does he realize that if there was anything he could do to save her, from the future she would pick always, he would do it. Without question, without consideration, without a second thought.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, and there’s something deeper. _I’m sorry for letting you down. I’m sorry you can’t stay. I’m sorry I wasn’t enough. I’m sorry that I can’t stay with you, in this life. I’m sorry for falling in love with you, knowing this was a possibility._

And yet, Nate’s not sorry he fell in love with her. He loves her more than words can describe; she’s beautiful, in all the ways that mattered. Kind, considerate, always willing to save the world if it meant giving up her personal happiness. He knows what happens to her: she goes back to Zambesi, and falls in love. They have a daughter shortly after, a gorgeous baby girl called Esi and Amaya glows as a mother, shines as a grandmother.

This was her future, not his.

“You’ve done nothing wrong,” Amaya tells him, and her face is indescribable to him. She’s searching too for answers, not because she doesn’t understand why she made the choices she did, but because she did know why. She knew them perfectly: they were ingrained to her by the Army, the values of personal sacrifice for the mission, for the greater good. She’s protected the president, and stood within his vicinity—he owed her his life, once, and that means something, dammit.

Nate looks at her, distraught and sadder than words could tell. “I love you. I always have.” They feel like a death wish now, once joyful and meaningful, and now all Amaya thinks is that the formation of guilt beating within her chest and driving up her chest won’t leave, if ever.

She smiles at him, moving closer to him than before. It’s comforting, knowing that he’s here, and bittersweet. She holds the memory close to her, squeezing his hand before telling him. “I know.”

Her past catches up with her; in him she sees Henry’s determination and Henry’s bravery, the culmination of service and sacrifice. So much like the values instilled in her, but that war belonged to her. He belongs to branch of the military, but has been a student of it, of history, and so his knowledge is academic, holistic. He’s bled and he’s bruised, but before he did, he’d learned it and considered it.

He’s emotionally open, and it springs, bursts. He’s learned full well how to conceal his emotions, the same way Henry once did, but can’t pull it off. He’s too honest for that, and it’s part of why she loves him so deeply, so tenderly. He didn’t pretend to be someone he wasn’t, and in that truth, she finds that his adoration of her has grown to mean the world to her.

She says nothing as he lays against her shoulders, and they stay that way, his hand tightly clasped around hers. This is a preemptive goodbye, and they both know it.

“We still have tonight,” he tells her, voice thick with emotion. A reminder of what she’s yet to lose, as though she isn’t losing him already. He slips from her fingertips just as she does his, and their relationship, this life they once had, holds them together, an anchor to ward away heartbreak and guide them home, just as a lighthouse does.

One night isn’t enough time, but it’s enough. Amaya knows sacrifice the same way she knows herself: savor the memories and hold on the good times, because when the people that inhabit those memories are gone, those were all she had. Such was the nature of war; fleeting, heart wrenching and without equivalent. She’d survived a war, and in the aftermath, in her travels, she finds that she’s haunted by ghosts.

People she’s long since lost, or people she’s yet to lose. The verdict’s still out on where people sorted, but as Amaya comforts the man she’s loved and never stopped loving, she knows Nathaniel Heywood will stay with her, long after they part.

It’s a promise, she tells herself, holding back the inner turmoil inside her. If she had less control and more gall, more reckless love like Sara, she would’ve fought. If she was Zari, passionate and always searching for loopholes, she’d find one.

But, and this was her truth, she isn’t. She follows what’s right and her duties, in spite of all personal feelings, and that was all that mattered. The war may have been won, but she is still a soldier. She is still fighting for liberty, for justice, for the values and freedoms people have died for, and they matter. They always have.

She may have left the war, but she is still a soldier. It’s never really ended, she reflects, the mission parameters had changed instead. She’s still here, after all the other members of the Justice Society have passed, and so she’ll carry on their mission.

“Nathaniel,” she tells him, “I love you.” I love you more than I could ever say. “I don’t regret falling in love you.” The melancholy in her voice, the same way she’d learned how to toast fallen teammates, “never forget that.”

If he embraces her tightly and she has a wet spot on her shoulder that wasn’t there before, she doesn’t notice it. She does notice how he holds her; he’s still in some ways younger, his own life experiences leaving him open, without the reservation of weariness she’s long since adopted.

They spend the night like this, in his bedroom, fully awake and unwilling to say anything. Words were precious, but above all, they were finite. This—whatever it was they had, this wonderful conglomeration of love and treasure and memory and joy and pleasure and above all, happiness—was more than that. 

Nathaniel falls asleep eventually, exhaustion tearing away at his eye lids, and only then does she leave. She watches him, his sleeping form, and she still doesn’t want to say goodbye, even if she must. A kiss on the forehead, one he won’t remember, but it’s better that way.

She goes back to her room and packs her things into containers, boxes to leave there. Her clothes, her make up, her photos. The framed picture of the two of them she’d requested Gideon make as a keepsake. A black and white photo of the Justice Society, dating back to December of 1941.

They would likely all be abnormalities in 1942, and so she leaves them in a corner in Nathaniel’s room. One day, she hopes that he’ll open them and remember her, remember them for what they had, precious and finite, and in his mind, something gone far too soon. Amaya can’t say she disagrees.

But for now, this was enough. It had to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at johnsconstantine.


End file.
